World Opera season programs

For opera devotees, fans, 'tragics' … etc., but mainly for myself, I've developed a synthetic RSS feed of news about Season events, tickets and subscriptions for Opera houses around the world that you can find near the bottom of this page.

I've used Yahoo Pipes and Yahoo's YQL—an SQL-type query language for Yahoo search databases—to search for new season announcements from the world's opera houses and mangled the results into an RSS format. The links in the feed jump to the announcement pages for each Opera house.

Hope you enjoy it. Please let me know.

Your thoughts?…

Century trends in Victorian temperatures

There are a dozen or so rural Victorian weather stations, of the 255 listed as reporting maximum temperature data to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, that have records stretching back to years before 1900. I have found them by skimming through the listings on this page at the BOM website. It has a helpful graphic that dynamically displays the record length.

I thought it might be interesting to see the trend of maximum temperatures in these rural locations. The graphic (click the thumbnail) shows that in eight of these twelve sites, including one NSW site—Deniliquin, almost on the Victorian border—the temperature trend is negative or flat. The trend estimate is a simple, linear least-squares trend over the longest period available in each record with 1-sigma bands as indicated. The idea for this experiment came from a post at the Carbon-Sense Coalition website.

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Website engine in new hands

I'm a fan of Burton Malkiel's analysis of equities markets; I invest mainly in indexes. Consequently, it's not all that often that commercial A&M actions threaten something of value to me. But this is different.

Oracle's proposed purchase of Sun affects the future of a key asset in which I have a huge consumer surplus. You, too, probably. Just last year, Sun bought the open-source database MySQL on which this site—like millions of others—is based. It's a vital piece of the web: not irreplaceable, but still…

Here's the problem. Sun was a long-term, serial supporter of "open-sourced" software (maybe that was Sun's undoing?). But Oracle makes a competing, more powerful, commercial database server. It will now also own Sun's other open-source ventures such as OpenOffice.org, and Virtual Box virtualization software…not to mention the jewel in Sun's dowry: Java.

Your thoughts?…

Teachers’ kits on WTO - Keeping the peace

The final installment (for now) of my Teachers Kits on WTO, designed to help teachers in junior, middle and high schools deliver classes on WTO as part of, for example, a civics curriculum. The kits were commissioned by the WTO.

This installment concerns WTO dispute settlement: a subject that might be too advanced for junior school, so this kit contains class materials only for middle and high schools. As usual, class exercises are included, too. There is a full set of teachers' notes that will help you to develop the lessons and provide some additional material (as well as the solutions to the exercises).

Earlier parts of this series covered the origins of the GATT/WTO trading system and trade in goods are also available for download.

If you've been able to make any use of these materials as a teacher or because you decided to test your knowledge of WTO with the 'class exercises', I'd really appreciate hearing from you (in the comments or by email). Thank you!

Your thoughts?…

Teacher’s Kit on WTO — Trade in Goods

Time to continue my series of posts publishing the Teacher’s Kits on WTO, including class materials for Middle and Senior Schools, class exercises, and Teacher’s Notes.

Last time, I published links to the PDF files for the lessons called ‘About the WTO’. This time, two PDF files for lessons titled ‘Trade in Goods’.

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Would ‘critical mass’ agreements in WTO be ‘fissile’ or ‘fusional’?

Here is the paper I presented today to the Melbourne University Center for Public Policy seminar on the Future of the Multilateral Trade System. It asks would 'critical mass' agreements—as recommended by the Warwick Commission—reinforce ('fuse') the WTO's Single Undertaking or would they tend to pull it apart ('fission')? I welcome your comments.

Your thoughts?…

IMF Data Mapper

Trade data sets are large and often difficult to interpret. Simplifying the data and showing policy-relevant relationships is important. The new IMF Data Mapper is a brilliant new on-line tool for doing just that

Click the thumbnail image to see an example map.

Your thoughts?…

Activities in 2007

A map (click for a better view), at no particular scale, of some of my activities in 2007. A lot of traveling, some outstanding meals—grilled Croker fish and wild greens in Abuja, barbecue mutton with sweetbreads in Karachi—some fascinating characters, and good friends. There were a couple of marathons (the SPS database; trade & tariff simulations on 51 grains markets) and at least one job that was just fun: classroom exercises for the Teachers’ kits on WTO.

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Inquit Database of SPS notifications

here to open the IQ SPS database in a new window”>

I’ve built a new database of WTO notifications of Sanitary and Phytosanitary measures, covering all measures notified to WTO from September 1999 to April 2007 May 2007. [UPDATE] The database contains some 6,170 6265 records [UPDATE] of which about 150 corrections. On average, governments are notifying about 75 new measures every month. The rapid growth of global trade in processed food, pharmaceuticals and ‘nutraceuticals’—not to mention fears of epidemic zoonoses— is adding daily to the heap of barriers

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Access to the Inquit Standards Database

The Inquit database of SPS and TBT standards is still available has been retired and replaced with new database of SPS measures (see this story). The data on SPS measures and TBT measures had a number of errors due, mostly, to the inconsistent way that Members filled out their notifications in the first few years of the WTO system. The new datbase is much more accurate, and links directly to the WTO notifications so, after finding the measure(s) you’re interested in, you can download the details from WTO.

Your thoughts?…

WTO and Developing Countries

here to open WTODC in a new window”>

The World Trade Organization has commissioned Inquit to write a number of publications. One of the first—in 1999—was “WTO and Developing Countries”, which described the impact on Developing Country members of the Uruguay Round Agreements and the provisions that the agreements made specifically for development.

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Why market access matters to developing countries

Just before the September 2003 Cancún Ministerial Conference of WTO, the Australian National Farmers’ Federation commmissioned me to write a pamphlet for the Cairns’ Group Farm Leaders’ meeting on the importance of market access to developing country gains in the Doha Round of trade negotiations.

Although it’s now more than three years old, and the trade data is a little dated, the analysis still works. You can download a somewhat colorful printed version of the booklet from website of the Rural Industry Research and Development Corporation, who published the pamphlet for NFF.

Your thoughts?…

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